While undeniably tragic, it's fitting that Paul Walker lost his life in a car accident. It wasn't just his career that was defined by the adrenaline-soaked automotive orgies of the Fast & Furious series; his whole life hummed with a love of cars. A friend of mine, during a junket for Fast & Furious 6 this year, found him to be distant and unresponsive until she asked him a question about cars, at which point he all but grabbed her by the hand and giddily dug around inside an engine for her. This is why Walker will be predominately remembered as Brian O'Conner, the undercover cop who found himself at odds with Vin Diesel's street Racer in 2001's The Fast and the Furious.

There was more to Walker than that, of course. He'll be remembered for scowling silently behind the wheel of a car, but there was a lighter side as well. For instance, his first big role was the sitcom Throb. It was objectively terrible, it was produced by Proctor & Gamble, and Walker only lasted for the first series, but there was a glimmer of potential.

After all, what could 1994's Tammy and the T-Rex possibly be, other than a clear sign that Paul Walker had a clear gift for the absurd? This explanation won't do the film the justice, but Walker played a teenager who, after being mauled by a lion, falls into a coma and has his brain removed by a mad scientist. The brain is used to control a raging animatronic dinosaur. His girlfriend, played by Denise Richards, realises that the dinosaur has Paul Walker's exact personality and tries to win him back by taking her clothes off. I'm not making any of this up.

Walker's first shot at non-dinosaur movie stardom came in 1998 with a small but memorable role in Pleasantville. As Skip, the handsome and easily corruptible resident of 1958, Walker found an archetype that would sadly come to define much of his career - the weirdly underutilised man-candy.

The following year, Walker continued to mine his burgeoning status as a teeny heartthrob by playing Dean Sampson Jr in She's All That, a lesser installment in Hollywood's late-90s fad of turning all classic texts into lightweight teen comedies starring people with horrible haircuts. Here, Walker plays Colonel Pickering to Freddie Prinze Jr's Henry Higgins. There's an extended dance sequence to a Fatboy Slim song. It has not aged well.

By 2005, Walker was already the star of two Fast & Furious movies. And yet, outside of the franchise, he still struggled to make a name for himself. The nadir probably came when he made Into The Blue; a terrible film that people only went to see because Jessica Alba wore a bikini in it. Playing yet another dead-eyed hunk, there was a sense that Paul Walker needed to move out of his comfort zone if he was going to be taken seriously. And so he did.

Even for a man who once made a film about a dinosaur moved to placidity by the sight of Denise Richards's cleavage, 2006's Running Scared is far and away the weirdest film in Paul Walker's filmography. Not to be confused with the equally weird 1986 Billy Crystal cop movie of the same name, Running Scared was the closest that Walker ever came to making Crank. The ever-reliable Common Sense Media said of the film: "Parents need to know that this movie is absolutely not for kids. It's determinedly violent and disturbing. Characters include gangsters, drug dealers, junkies, an abusive stepfather, a prostitute and pimp, and a couple who kidnap children to film in pornographic situations". Running Scared would have opened up a new career path for Walker if it had been a hit, but it wasn't to be.

In the same year, Paul Walker dabbled at the opposite end of the spectrum by playing the lead in Disney's Eight Below. To be fair, he was the lead in name alone – the film is comprehensively stolen by its canine performers. Walker goes through the motions well enough, but the film invests such a vast amount of time and emotion into his team of huskies, who are abandoned in Antarctica and have to struggle for survival, that he didn't stand a chance. Despite this – and despite the fact that the film primarily appealed to people who like to make YouTube montages and set them to MIDI files of My Heart Will Go On – it's perhaps Walker's most successful, and definitely his most heartbreaking, non-automotive outing.

But it's the Fast & Furious series that Paul Walker will be remembered for. Although his career, and the trajectory of the series, had begun to spiral, his return for 2009's Fast & Furious was precisely the shot in the arm that everyone needed. This was the perfect opportunity for him to play to his strengths – grimacing, growling, overflowing with perhaps slightly too much testosterone – and he seemed to realise it. With Fast & Furious, Paul Walker was back.

Fast Five, which followed two years later, was the high point of his entire career. The cast had been jiggled about, meaning that the film was technically now a bullet-headed love-letter between Vin Diesel and The Rock, but Walker still played an indelible part. What's more, the film itself was such a dunderheaded ballet of impossible physics and ridiculous flesh and blood stuntwork that not even the snootiest of cinephile could bring themselves to hate it.

And then there was Fast & Furious 6, which cemented the formula even further. It's slightly uncomfortable to mark the life of a man who died in a car crash with a series of clips where several cars are spectacularly destroyed, but this is what Paul Walker did. In life he was inextricably linked to the automotive world, and now he is in death. This is apt. When it came to making cars look cool, few were better than Paul Walker.